Why Do I hate AppWizard?

Do you remember the first time you tried out MS's Visual C++? You spent a half an hour filling up your hard disk with the hundreds of megabytes of Install from the CD, tentatively leafed through the volumous 10 page instruction manual that came with it, excitedly ran the AppWizard, and, low and behold... there was a fully fledged Windows App, complete with window (of course) menu, button bar, even printing, and errr.. that's it.

No problem though, because lots of extra functionality could easily be added to basic program... or could it????

This is where the problem really started. A quick look in the directory created by the AppWizard revealed a stunning array of about 15 or more files, most of which with almost exactly the same name. A snappy return to the might tome of the MSVC++ Welcome Guide did nothing to illuminate the rapidly murkying waters, and a delve into the further megabytes of the Books Online seemed to just make matters worse.

And that was where things seemed to grind to a halt. An appalling amount of work seemed to be required in order to get even the slightest bit further, and worst still, all of the C and C++ programing skills and intuition that have been aquired over the years suddenly seemed useless, like a limp dangly thing that doesn't do much.

There wasn't even a

main()
function!!!

However, rather than give in, I just gave in writing WinApps and went back to doing my work (physics!) in plain old C or C++. Only some time later after a few chance findings on the net did I begin to realise that there was an alternative to all of this...

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